FROM CHOKOLOSKEE CHICKEN TO PANAMA RED: FLORIDA'S Love Affair with Larceny
Rothchild, John
FROM CHOKOLOSKEE CHICKEN TO PANAMA RED: FLORIDA'S Love Affair with Larceny by John Rothchild Editor's note: In exploring why certain government policies fail, policy makers in Washington too...
...In its editorial section, the Miami Herald opposed the bootleggers, the violence, the illegal trade...
...Bales were so prevalent that police lobbied for a change in the rules of evidence because they lacked storage space to keep the bales until the trials...
...new storage buildings went up along the Barron River...
...The officials do not stop at saying that smuggling is a result of geography...
...Brown would approach the wall full-throttle, I would hunch over and close my eyes, and suddenly we were beyond the wall, inside the mangroves, speeding through a tunnel of foliage and with such critical tolerance that a veer of inches would result in a crash...
...airplanes, undercover agents, support on ground, sea, and air, united to stop the drug traffic...
...nobody wanted to be on his bad side...
...They raided Jack's Chili Parlor, a speakeasy called the Hillcrest just off the Dixie Highway, and a fish house near the South Miami bridge...
...A procession of new vans, their sides painted with mermaids, sunsets, and mountains, made its way into town...
...The more the endangered species list grew, the more the Everglades residents delighted in depleting it at meals...
...Prohi Raids Prove Failure," the Herald headline said...
...Federal authorities estimated that Prohibition was 75 percent less enforceable in Florida than in other states, and not because of its natural hiding places...
...One that repeats itself, certainly...
...He dressed up in a black-and-white convict suit and seemed to be in great humor...
...Down at Momma Dot's cafe, the popular look of the stone crab fishermen—work shirt, work pants, rubber boots—was modified to allow gold chains and jewelry, the display of which required that the work shirts be unbuttoned just above the belly...
...Brown took me on a day-long boat ride out the Barron River, across Chokoloskee Bay, around the confusing succession of small islands covered with the twisted root systems of mangrove trees...
...This economy of movement and expression made him appear confident beyond swagger...
...It was the Coast Guard, and not the smugglers, who were the local Public Enemy Number One...
...This article is adapted from his book, Up for Grabs, to be published by Viking in March...
...After I had eaten a few federally protected lunches I was told that my providers were descended from the plume hunters who shot up the bird rookeries back before the turn of the century...
...Everglades City's burgeoning new trade was left largely undisturbed by local law because in several families the uncle was a policeman and the cousin the pot hauler, or the father the policeman and the mother the town librarian and the son the pot hauler, or even the son the policeman and the father the pot hauler...
...Children who earlier had qualified for the poverty-level free school breakfast program began to drive around town in sporty little three-wheeled off-the-road vehicles...
...The town's non-native residents were the last to connect the prosperity to the cause...
...He showed me the stash places where he left the skins, sometimes for weeks, until it was safe to retrieve them in his boat and transport them back to Chokoloskee and then Everglades City, and from there in car trunks north to Tampa or New York...
...We lay down in the boat now, flat as we could, the branches of the mangroves and oversized spider webs rushing across our field of vision a few inches above our eyes...
...Then the boat would break out of the island and into wide water, and I looked back and saw no opening and understood what it meant, in the Everglades, to be a genius...
...Some men wore several necklaces at a time...
...fewer crab boats went out at the usual early hours and more could be heard leaving the dock at night...
...the last time so many officials blamed a crime on geography was during Prohibition...
...It was not total acceptance—Miami newspapers berated this visitor as newspapers everywhere had done—but beyond the superficial outrage at his presence here, Capone was treated with unusual hospitality...
...Quick fortunes were made by such legendary rumrunners as Bill McCoy (the "real McCoy," who didn't cut his product), Cleo and Bootleg Sue, Havana Kitty and Jiggs Donahue, Stingray Jake Bunton...
...Lummus Jr., going through the motions that the mayors of other cities had already ritualized, announced that Capone was "unwelcome...
...How similar the modus operandi for both drugs and liquor, right down to the wrapping of the product in burlap (the marijuana package called square grouper...
...Brown used the maze to disorient the park rangers that futilely pursued him...
...So much cocaine has found its way to Miami that the price has collapsed...
...He was 60 years old when I met him in 1973, and six decades of natural tanning seemed to have stiffened him up somewhat, so that he moved as if he had a rod for a spine, and his speech sounded as if it had been recorded at 78 and was being played back at 16...
...They were purchased en masse by fishermen...
...In the Miami area, marijuana literally fell out of the skies...
...The rum came from the Bahamas...
...The major social event, besides the annual seafood festival and high school basketball, was the church supper...
...They always are careful to add that the geography itself is an "accident," thus diverting the blame from whatever gods laid out the continent...
...That in itself would be enough to divert the blame from society to the coastline full of hiding places, or to the latitudes, which stick in the state like a nose into the sewers of the Caribbean...
...Is there in the Florida setting, I wondered, a peculiar penchant for crime that exists around the carnival of its real estate and beyond the purview of its J. Edgar Hooverloving retirees...
...Rumrunners were the toast of the clubs...
...The ghost of Colonel Nutt This was the town that Colonel L.C...
...The woman who served me endangered loggerhead turtle (the daughter of a rum-running preacher) said that if I wanted more contemporary good stories to put in a magazine article, I should talk to Peg Brown, who was not old enough to have been a moonshiner, but whose father had been a moonshiner and whose grandfather had been a plume hunter...
...When he arrived in 1927, Florida was in its bust market, and any potential land buyer looked good...
...Fishermen on whom the park rangers had taken similar pity could now best a park ranger's annual salary in one night...
...They bought them from the gold chain dealer who came to town once a month...
...Hints that an alliance between some fishermen and drug smugglers would be even theoretically possible were dropped very gradually...
...On the other side of Glendening was Richard Wolferts, a local fisherman and one of the first to be arrested, not in Everglades City but somewhere up the coast...
...The night before he went to jail, Wolferts gave a huge party, attended by more than half the town, including all the local deputies and a majority of the local smugglers...
...Brown was steering—I don't know by what guideposts, since he seemed to be staring straight up...
...The natives there belonged to a fundamentalist sect called the Church of God...
...On the wall near the serving line for the barbecued wild hog he put up a wooden plaque, the kind used in mounting stuffed fish, but his prize catch was a burlap bale...
...Along with the real estate speculators, they were Miami's first aristocracy...
...There are spectacular busts all over south Florida, more arrests in the customs lines, the feds are amazed at the ease of getting evidence...
...hardly a conversation took place without some mention of drugs or jokes about the fish boxes being empty and Miami restaurants running out of stone crabs...
...Deputies and smugglers danced and reveled for hours in suspicious togetherness...
...Those arrested were not overly concerned even then— the entire federal effort on land, sea, and air resulted in six convictions...
...Policemen, bankers, judges, lawyers were all tied up in the business in Miami, where there was no corresponding legitimate industry to support bribes and boodle...
...His colleagues thought of him as a sea-level equivalent of the Deerslayer...
...Brown used those same coastal islands where the birds were once shot and the liquor was later stashed to hide a third successive felonious merchandise, alligator skins, which Peg Brown himself had separated from thousands of alligators...
...In the Miami area, marijuana literally fell out of the skies...
...Teenagers in the high school on whom the teachers had taken pity because they could not read and would never elevate themselves beyond the drudgery of crab traps were now rumored to be millionaires...
...I should acknowledge here my debt to "Miami's Bootleg Boom: A Decade of Prohibition," a master's thesis submitted to the University of Miami by Patricia Buchanan in January, 1967...
...Some bought celebratory cocaine or Quaaludes...
...they managed to arrest only 20 people...
...Nutt had promised to rescue via his federal task force in 1922...
...With no industry to which the virtues of pluck and luck applied, the model for economics was real estate, and land had gone from $10 an acre to $10,000 an acre in a matter of months...
...These people could afford chicken...
...Shannon was killed...
...Capone had sought residence in at least ten other cities from Kansas to Georgia and none had made him feel comfortable...
...New porches were added...
...Red Shannon was a Miami rumrunner and supplier of local hotels...
...Glendening bought a house right next door to me...
...Peg Brown's own brother Totch, who lived in a small cottage on Chokoloskee Island, eventually showed up in federal court in Miami to answer an IRS complaint about an avoidance of taxes...
...They were regular shoppers at the supermarkets in Naples...
...John Rothchild is a former editor of The Washington Monthly who lives in Florida...
...Garold Glendening of the Florida Marine Patrol, a state law-enforcement agency, was sent to Everglades City in part to put a stop to this...
...The New York Times reported that Col...
...The guests of the Flamingo Hotel could see it all from the hotel dock...
...Colonel Nutt's Forces Unearth Sensational Evidence," the Herald said...
...with cocaine, laxitives, Drano, or powdered milk), the manufacture of high-speed boats to outrun the Coast Guard (in the 1970s, cigarette skiffs that claw the water like sequined fingernails...
...What sort of accident is this...
...but then every time the police collared a suspect who was also a tourist, the newspaper blasted the police on the front page...
...Bush claims victory in the paper, but then a few months later, one opens the Herald to find a front-page article on the cocaine glut...
...Illicit trade was a tradition in Everglades City...
...The king, in this instance, was the Everglades National Park, established in 1947 after the sons of Barron Collier, the developer who put Everglades City on the map in the 1920s, gave most of the area around the city to the government...
...FROM CHOKOLOSKEE CHICKEN TO PANAMA RED: FLORIDA'S Love Affair with Larceny by John Rothchild Editor's note: In exploring why certain government policies fail, policy makers in Washington too rarely consider the influence of culture...
...weathered seafood companies were updated with walk-in freezers...
...The brother of the prosecuting attorney of Dade County— Miami's county—was arrested with a boatload...
...The Herald pointed out that the dentist invested heavily in Miami real estate on previous visits and wondered how "this might affect the tourist trade next winter...
...1984 by John Rothchild...
...Some economic reckoners said that smuggling, not tourism, was the biggest state industry...
...The fishermen saw the park as an endless source of unnecessary channel buoys, boat registration forms, restrictions on the seafood industry, and drivel about the public trust...
...But then there were monthly discoveries of floating bales...
...The rewards of tolerance Perhaps any state, any region, any culture, would not have resisted this profitable opportunity...
...Glendening was on the night shift...
...The sons of plume hunters flourished during Prohibition as moonshiners and rumrunners...
...Eventually, they smoked it...
...A few months after I arrived, some of my neighbors invited me to several meals of endangered species, either loggerhead turtle, gator tail, or curlew birds (locally called Chokoloskee chicken), all of which tasted indistinguishable when deep-fried...
...too many in his constituency would have done the same...
...Nutt retreated from Miami: "before he was laughed out of the state, but not before the snickers were audible!' In 1982 Vice President George Bush brought his federal task force to Miami...
...They frowned on jewelry and disallowed dancing...
...the liquor package, a ham), the transporting of it over the same sea routes, the cutting of it with some cheaper substance (with booze, it was water...
...Miami had been tipped off...
...Many had the musty odor of decomposition, as if they had been deposited underground...
...Four Coast Guardsmen were indicted by a local Miami judge for manslaughter, and then, after the Coast Guard refused to accept the subpoenas, the state of Florida filed murder charges against them...
...Peg Brown was reputed to be an exceptional fishing guide, a sharpshooter, and a man of his word...
...A bale of it broke through the roof of a house and nearly killed a man...
...Yet I was astonished by the universality of it, by the tacit support of the local establishment, without which a felony could never have become the state's major source of revenue...
...it was wrapped in burlap packages called hams and transferred from offshore mother ships to the fishermen's small boats, then brought inland for distribution...
...Florida's current attorney general, Jim Smith, told a congressional committee that "through an accident of nature and geography, Florida has become an international port of entry for most of the illicit drugs entering the United States!' The "accident of geography" speech is standard with politicians and state officials who must explain to Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce how marijuana came to be Florida's biggest industry...
...The failure of drug enforcement in Florida is an example...
...Certainly it was the biggest industry in Everglades City and doubtless in Miami as well...
...The moonshine was made from locally grown sugarcane...
...A bale of it broke through the roof of a house and nearly killed a man...
...The Bush task force may be discouraged, but it is not disbanded: the only difference between Bush and the colonel is that nobody laughs in public anymore...
...Even the densest inhabitants realized that a majority of the stone crab fleet had been enlisted in a fourth consecutive illegal trade...
...The park headquarters and ranger station, built at the south end of town, was despised as a kind of colonial embassy...
...the colonel was amazed at the ease of gathering the incriminating facts...
...Chokoloskee Island, three miles south of what later became Everglades City, was a headquarters for the plume trade...
...And after several weeks of sleuthing, 40 federal agents in eight squads struck in a surprise attack March 20...
...Marijuana smoking might not lead to heavier drugs, but marijuana profits did, and by 1979 it was not unusual to see fishermen with runny coke noses...
...We headed in and out of bays as wide as the entrance to New York harbor, and at each end the bays would narrow until it looked as if we were about to hit a solid wall of mangrove roots...
...In other parts of Florida, local sheriffs elected on drug clean-up platforms and then paid thousands of dollars a night to let the shipments through learned to dissemble to some extent—occasionally they posed triumphantly for the newspapers alongside some baggie confiscated from a high school student...
...As soon as six bootleg policemen were removed from office their replacements were implicated in the same business...
...Finally the Coast Guard caught up to him and his Liberty engines and chased him around Biscayne Bay...
...The mayor was criticized when his private dealings with the gangster were exposed, but he was not removed from office...
...elaborate upper decks and cabins appeared on the crab boats...
...they bought the biggest houses...
...The rewards of tolerance outweighed the demands of conviction...
...for months I watched him try to catch a smuggler...
...The youth of Everglades City, protected against such evil influences by their families and by their church, learned about marijuana the way children of industrial England learned about coal, collecting forgotten bits of it from the river banks, from the truck beds, from the ground...
...The mistaken arrest of.a delegate to a 1920 dental convention (even then, they had dental conventions) brought out a banner headline: "Officers Carry Out Enforcement of Prohi Amendment in High-Handed and Autocratic Manner...
...There were so many drugs everywhere in Florida that confiscations were distinguished with brand names like Operation Sunburn, Operation Grouper, Black Tuna—the names of busts, for some reason, more indigenous-sounding than the names of subdivisions...
...Shots were fired...
...Some of the smugglers did not like this result, while others concluded that pot was not half as bad as liquor...
...The symbiosis between Florida crime and Florida real estate is internalized in the person of Lummus, who as a citizen rejected Capone but as a businessman could not afford to...
...The hide trade ended only with a national ban on the sale and manufacture of alligator products in the early seventies...
...Florida Power and Light burned marijuana in the generators-736 pounds of marijuana equals one barrel of oil was the new Florida-inspired energy calculation...
...The case was diplomatically postponed and the men were exonerated, but Miami had chosen its side...
...Lummus secretly searched for a nice house for Capone and finally found one, over on a satellite island...
...he had to leave the party and all his targets to go out on futile patrol...
...At the beginning of the Florida boom Miami was a mud town, fewer than ten years connected to the nation via train...
...The women and some of the men attended Sunday services and Wednesday night sing-ins...
...Endangered eating was ritualistic larceny in the spirit of the English serfs who feasted off the king's deer...
...But in his role as realtor (what else would he have been...
...Mayor Lummus said that he had told the gangster as much to his face...
...So in his role as mayor of Miami Beach, J.N...
...The only substance besides land that offered a similar return was illegal liquor, which first sold for less than $10 a quart, diluted...
...The hardware store located next to Momma Dot's cafe began to receive more $20 and $100 bills than could easily be changed...
...The rivers that separate these islands devolve into subtle little estuaries, and only local fishermen can negotiate the mangrove maze...
...Big Bills at Momma Dot's In the mid-1970s, Everglades City enjoyed a sudden and unprecedented prosperity...
...backyard swimming pools dug...
...Later, after the populist phase ended and the neighborhood bootleggers gave way to organized crime leaders from out of state, the Miami area offered Al Capone acceptance...
...Nobody said a negative thing about him, not even the park rangers he embarrassed with 10,000 alligator skins, his personal tabulation of a 20-year gross product...
...Banks Involved in Booze Trade," another headline informed...
...Florida had more nature in which to disappear back then...
...First we heard that various fishermen had lucked into giant schools of very lucrative pompano, and when some bales of pot were captured offshore by marine patrols, they were thought to be flotsam from the urban marijuana industry...
...His entry was triumphal...
...The money he received, and could not spend, he buried under a tree in his yard...
...With his gnarled hands he produced more than $1 million in cashier's checks and offered up a similar amount in property in the hope that it would settle his little debt to the government...
...Searches and seizures of any Miami visitor were by definition unreasonable...
...Felonious dinners, moonshiners, and poachers—I began to realize that the clandestine opportunism had enlisted the entire regional geneology, fathers, sons, uncles, and cousins, over a period of 75 years...
...Its earliest residents killed thousands of birds so the remains could be stuck in hats...
...I used to feel sorry for Glendening, having to take his patrol boat out on mosquitoinfested nights when the entire town knew the instant he stepped onto the dock...
...in the 1920s, it was Nuta-built 34-footers with twin Liberty engines), the endless confiscation of these boats, stacked like attic trophies along the Miami River, the frequent murders (the per capita rate higher in 1925 than in 1981, we were recently relieved to discover in a report entitled "Historic Trends in Dade County Homicides"), the proud list of seizures (government announces $1 million in liquor seized in 1926-28, sheriff's department closes down 300 stills in the Everglades, recalls 1,820 gallons of moonshine, 3,640 quarts of liquor, 72,500 gallons of mash, 25,352 bottles of home brew, federal agents pour 240 bottles and 25 gallons of moonshine down a Miami manhole, in the presence of amazed and unhappy onlookers...
...He showed me the entrance to obscure lakes, where hundreds of alligators once floated until he methodically shot them in the head with his rifle, one after another, and then dragged them to an island to be skinned and salted, the rangers alerted to his activities by the buzzards that swarmed overhead...
...Despite a variety of government efforts over the years— including, most recently, a federal task force headed by George Bush—drugs continue to pour into the state, making a mockery of the government's attempts to enforce the law In the following excerpt from his forthcoming book, Up For Grabs, John Rothchild looks at the reasons for this failure that are to be found not through the study of law enforcement theory but by looking at Florida's past and collecting first-hand observations of its people and institutions.] I settled in Everglades City in 1973...
...radar installed...
...National disgust at the Florida end of the hat business led the Audubon Society to send two agents to investigate the bird-killing in 1903, when one of the agents got killed himself...
...Like some of their successors in the marijuana trade, the rumrunners didn't have to hide anything...
...The real surprise was that the Nutt forces nabbed anybody...
...Many problems persist not for lack of rational thought about the solution, but because they are addressed in a vacuum, without an understanding of historical and sociological factors that created them in the first place...
...He enjoyed the tolerance of hoteliers with empty suites, and of real estate agents with no immediate prospects...
...Conservation versus millinery was the legal and ethical conflict of the 1900s...
...Halt Flow of Drug Money, State Urged," the Herald headline said...
...Is there in the Florida setting, I wondered, a peculiar penchant for crime that exists around the carnival of its real estate and beyond the purview of millions of its J. Edgar Hoover-loving retirees...
Vol. 16 • January 1985 • No. 12
